Case Studies

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, integrating research and clinical care to serve 79,000 patients annually, wanted to improve the flow of its data. Because of its unique and sophisticated needs, MD Anderson chose to build an electronic medical record system in-house, with a service-oriented architecture to connect and display data using the Microsoft .NET Framework. With the help of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Avanade, MD Anderson implemented standards and processes to develop a sophisticated application to provide data to medical staff using the Microsoft environment. The system—and the IT department methodology it is built on—is flexible, highly secure, and scalable to support future growth. Most important, however, it has improved the productivity of MD Anderson medical staff, resulting in greatly enhanced patient care.

Since 1996, United Kingdom retailer Tesco PLC has seen a rapid increase in the number of its customers, and has added many nonfood products and services to its catalog. To accommodate this growth, Tesco created the Tesco Direct service and built a new order-processing system based on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 to support its operation. The new solution works better with suppliers’ warehousing software systems, is more reliable, and has increased order-processing capacity. It has achieved its intended performance benchmark of processing 5,000 orders per hour, while using only 20–25 percent of processor capacity. This enhanced performance has made it possible for Tesco to add to its catalog of products and services without expanding the current hardware configuration, thereby reducing system maintenance costs.

HP is a global provider of IT products and services, with sales channels that include online “storefronts” available to customers in many different countries. Over the past few years, the rapid expansion of the Internet-based business created operational complexity that was difficult for HP to manage. To streamline its Internet-based sales outlets, HP implemented a new service-oriented architecture by using Microsoft software, including Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and Windows Server 2003. The technology is helping HP consolidate its online storefront presence. It is also helping the company capture more revenue per order—the company estimates that the new solution has increased revenues on logistical services by about 14 percent per order. Customer service is also streamlined through the changes to real-world business processes.

T-Com, a division of Deutsche Telekom, is one of the largest broadband and fixed-network providers in Europe. Previously, T-Com provided value-added network services, like Web hosting, to customers, using a system that was difficult and costly to maintain and update. To enhance its position in the competitive telecommunications industry, T-Com needed to decrease the time it took to get new services to market, while keeping costs down. The company turned to Sapient, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to build a centralized, automated provisioning system based on a service-oriented architecture. T-Com makes these real-world business processes possible with Microsoft BizTalk Server. The new system is able to handle 10 times more customers than the previous system and has reduced provisioning costs by 10-15 percent. T-Com also can bring new services to market 40 percent faster than before.

Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena is one of Italy’s leading banks. It wanted to develop new services and improve its existing architecture to increase its market share and corporate customer base. This included improving the number of transactions it completed in near real time and quicker processing times of bank-to-bank facilitation. The bank wanted a solution that could deploy the Interbank Corporate Banking solution. This telematic banking service allows banks to send payments and collection orders through standard messaging. To do this, the bank needed to improve its batch-based architecture and replace its mainframe solution to increase manageability, scalability, and to better meet the needs of its growing business. With the payments solution—which uses Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 to orchestrate workflows and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for data management—the bank has reduced payment times from a few days to near real time.

The Colorado Housing and Finance Authority (CHFA) was using an aging, inflexible IBM System i-based (AS400) solution to manage the process of financing affordable home loans for low-income Coloradans. As a result, the process was time-consuming and expensive. To better achieve its mission, the agency moved to a custom solution based on Captaris Workflow from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Captaris and a range of Microsoft technologies. The new solution, called Stars, enables CHFA to handle a 30-percent increase in loan volume without increasing staff—while also increasing the quality of those loans by 300 percent. The published review time for loans has been cut by 67 percent, and new solutions and solution enhancements are produced up to 70 percent faster.